It is no good having a great web site if no one is visiting it. The days of just being able to upload content and expect it to be found via search engines are, generally speaking, long gone. If your competitors are being found higher up the search engine listings than your site is, you need to do something about it. It won’t just climb higher by itself.

Proper optimisation is vital if you are not to be lost amidst millions of other web sites. The first thing is to find out what people are actually searching for! After all, there is no point in optimising your site for search terms that no one is actually using.

Our Site Marketing Setup Service includes running an analysis of your web site and presenting you with an easy to understand report that shows you exactly what key words and phrases you should be aiming to be optimising your site for, and we then go through your web site’s most important pages and properly optimise them for search engines.

On one level, basic optimisation of a web page is pretty easy, it’s just that Google and other search engines keep amending the criteria by which a page web is indexed and ranked. Do remember that Google and other top search engines - generally speaking - don’t like SEO businesses as they manipulate results to get their clients closer to the top of the rankings. Google’s intention is to produce more “natural” results, rather than results loaded by clever SEO work and their view is that if you want to "buy" a high position for specific keywords, you can bid against others using Google Ads.

So, from time to time, they improve they improve the way results are delivered, and try and make it harder for the organic/natural results to be manipulated by search engine optimisation and marketing firms. For example, until recently, the accepted way of getting a page indexed and ranked effectively, was to ensure that a handful of key words were woven into a phrase and variations of this phrases were then included in the page title, description, keywords and actual content of the page itself. The more you used these keywords, the better. There were loads of other factors that helped too, such as link popularity [ie how many sites linked to yours and how high Google ranked these sites].

All this has now been turned on its head by Google. In simple terms Google's algorithms now rank your website using a number of different factors:
a) On your page titles, descriptions, H1 headers and page content. Ideally content should be well written using good grammar, and updated regularly.
b) On how many well ranked, relevant sites link to you. Google likes links to your site from other websites that it deems "important" or "relevant". It does NOT like loads of random links from irrelevant websites.
c) How many visitors your site is getting. Regardless of how they find your website, if your site is getting visitors, Google will think it is more important than a similar site that isn't getting as many.

Google’s new algorithms centre round reducing the key word density amongst page content, so any unnecessary duplication or variation of key words needs to be edited or removed. They also want to reduce the amount of internal linking to the same page using the same word or phrase.

Furthermore, the key words field in the meta tags is no longer used by search engines. Although leaving them in there it does no harm from a search perspective they are not of any benefit and we recommend removing them to increase your text to html ratio. In short, the content on the site needs to be written for humans, not search engines.

We think this emphasis on "natural" results is a good thing. When we search for things via Google, we want to see the right results on merit, not ones that have been manipulated. It might take a bit more time for the cream to rise to the top, but if your business is a good one, you will end up where you should be if you just do the basics correctly. We play things very “straight” with how your pages are set up, and we concentrate on setting pages up so that someone who was genuinely interested in a type of business/service/product would find it if they used an intelligent search. However, we also need to concentrate on the key words which are actually being used to find businesses like yours, as there is no point in spending time optimising pages for search terms that are not being used.

If you want better results in a hurry, we recommend running a Google Ad campaign.

For more information, contact us on 01526 352919, or email [email protected].

Google and other search engines have strict guidelines on how your web site pages need to be set up in order to be properly indexed and ranked.

Although it is comparatively straightforward to optimise your page for obvious key words and phrases, it's worth doing research into what keywords really are being used to find businesses like yours. These high to medium competition terms need to be included in your web pages.

Google and other engines also place value on links to your web site from established web sites relevant to your market sector. This data is processed to give your own website a ranking. If you adhere to the following fundamental steps, your website’s rankings will improve dramatically.

1] Optimise your website properly. This means writing good content. We suggest running a full keyword and competitor analysis to ensure that you use the best combinations of words in your titles, descriptions and page content.

2] Build strong links to your website. Links from major websites in your industry will improve your ranking, as will well written, articulate blog articles, optimised to ensure your key words are given prominence, and placed on sites that Google regularly indexes.

These don’t have to be about your business or products, they can be about things happening in your market which you have an opinion on, or wish to convey. The “trick” is in optimising the article so that it does a job for you, and links readers towards the key pages on your website you want them to visit. Remember to ensure the page you are linking to is properly optimised too.

NB: If your current website does not have a proper blog or news element [and by that we mean one that includes optimisation tools], it’s probably time you thought about a new website. Even on a basic level, a blog gets your news “out there”.

3] Invest in an online advertising campaign with Google Ads. It's not only a cost effective way of getting your site visible, it gives you lots of feedback as to what terms people are actually entering to find you.

4] Ensure your domain email and web address appear on all letterheads, business cards, leaflets, adverts and directories.

5] Use social media and newsletters to develop a following and regularly update them of your news and to direct them back to your website.